Help Me Rhonda, Sloop John B, I Get Around, Wouldn't It Be Nice, California Girls, Little Green Apples, The Way We Were, Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You, Suspicious Minds, Wichita Lineman, Last Train To Clarksville, Homeward Bound, I Am A Rock, Scarborough Fair, River Deep, Mountain High, Love Child, Baby Love, Stop In The Name Of Love, Back In My Arms Again, You Can't Hurry Love, Midnight Confessions, Light My Fire?

My vote: The fact that the button on the map that tells the software to center the map on your current location also causes the map to re-size! What the hey? It as though recalculating a spreadsheet also rounded off all of the numbers, or printing a document also converted it into a PDF file.

Worse yet: The software actually fights the user over the map zoom level. The level it chooses when you hit the "current location" button is way more zoomed in than I usually want (because most often I am using it to see the traffic ahead of me, and I already know where I am and am going), so I zoom out. But as it locates me, the software zooms back in. I zoom out again. It zooms in again.

All this while one is rapidly approaching the fork in the highway where one has to choose a direction based on the traffic.

Well, as Yogi Berra used to say, "When you see a fork in the road, take it."

I now have a large base of references in my various papers and forthcoming book. I'd like to start using a reference management tool to manage this, but when I look at their import options, they mostly seem to want to be handed a file marked up in some database format for importing.

Is there any software out there that parses your existing references and imports them? I used to write these kind of filters when I worked for Ntergaid, one of the first PC hypertext companies, and I know they are error-prone. But cleaning up 5% of my references is better than trying to put 100% of them in some tab- or comma-delimited text format.

I've ever seen so bold a claim put forward by a respected academic backed by so little evidence. (Note: Perhaps Ferguson has TONS of evidence and it just didn't make it into this piece. But this piece is all a reader of it has to go upon!)

Let's take a quick look at what seems to Ferguson's sole piece of evidence for his claim that Turkey's leader is looking to establish a new Ottoman empire:In his early career as mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan was imprisoned for publicly reciting these lines by an early-20th-century Pan-Turkish poet: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.” His ambition, it seems clear, is to return to the pre-Atatürk era, when Turkey was not only militantly Muslim but also a regional superpower.Well, there you have it: Early in his career, Erdogan recited a few lines of controversial poetry! Clearly, those lines were his Mein Kampf.

Aristotle taught us that the art of politics consists in knowing how to balance the "admitted goods" of the polity, one against another, so as to best promote the flourishing of its members. This is a tricky matter, calling for experience and judgment. How much simpler if one can forgo any balancing, and declare only one type of good -- equality, property rights, productivity, scientific advancement, military readiness, etc. etc. -- to be a true good at all, and create a politics that makes the pursuit of that good absolute and ignores every other one! This leads to an all or nothing attitude: if there is any compromise in pursuit of the supreme good, then all is lost!

For example, here Ryan Wills looks at my first blog post on obligations. (Funny, unlike some people, Ryan had no trouble figuring out just what I was talking about!) Now, I don't mean to pick on Ryan: he has seemed like a very decent fellow when he has come around here to comment. But he displays the tend…

When I posted this about positive obligations, several libertarian commentators could not imagine what in the world I was talking about. My suggestion was 'absurd' to one commentator, but at least another was merely puzzled. These guys really know libertarian theory, so I must be wrong. Where in the world would I have gotten such a strange idea?

"In the free society, no man may be saddled with the legal obligation to do anything for another, since that would invade the former’s rights; the only legal obligation one man has to another is to respect the other man’s rights." -- Murray Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty

I have a large MS Word 2011 document in which I have now turned off highlighting for tracked changes about a dozen times. But every time I pull it back up the highlighting is turned back on! The problem is, if I forget to turn it back off before I print, I may get a couple of hundred useless pages printed out, because all of the text is too small to read (because it is made smaller to allow room for the change comments to show in the right margin).

Help! Is there a way to get this turned off for good? (I have already turned off track changes itself: it is the highlighting by which I am troubled.)

"Instead of trying to be someone that you are not, be the best at what you are. My own writing practices are the direct opposite of that followed by these prolific and renowned writers. I write only when I have something to say. The big disadvantage of this is that it can mean a lot of down time. There are manuscripts of mine that sat around gathering dust for years without a word being added to them. How then have I managed to write more than 20 books within the Biblical threescore and ten years?

"My own particular idiosyncracy is writing several books at once. I may reach the point where I have nothing whatever to add to a manuscript on Marxism or affirmative action, but am bursting with things to say about late-talking children. I go with what has seized my attention and inspired my thoughts at the time. There are days, perhaps even weeks, when I have nothing worth saying in print about anything. I keep a backlog of u…

Is the title of a great song, but also the subject of today's meditation on how one can pick up a bad attitude in seemingly innocuous places. Consider weather forecasts that tell you "Tomorrow is going to be a miserable day." At first, you might think, "Well, they don't mean you have to be miserable! They just mean the weather is going to be lousy." But that, my friends, is the real problem! Who are we that we should sit in judgment on the weather?! As my friend Clayon used to say, whenever he heard a remark like that, "Personally, I don't criticize any weather, because I can't make any myself."

"Democrats are channeling their frustration with America's imminent military victory in Afghanistan into hysterical opposition to reasonable national security measures at home. (Incidentally, this ought to prove once and for all what a bunch of paper tigers the Russians are. What were they doing over there for 10 years? It hasn't taken us 10 weeks.)" -- Ann Coulter

I've been led to Jonathan Chait, of whom I was blissfully unaware until today, by the hub-bub over Stephen Metcalf's Nozick piece. Chait seems to be very much a style-over-substance kind of guy, ready with a quick zinger even if it makes no sense:

"Of course, pitting Brooks against a Nobel prize winning economist (Krugman) in a debate over public policy is about as fair as making Krugman debate me about the University of Michigan football team."

Yes, because, you know, being a top economist who won the Nobel Prize gives one clear-headed insights into policy issues. That is why top economists always agree on those issues. Like Paul Krugman and, say, Milton Friedman.

with journals that like to run photos sans captions? For instance, here Reason runs a photo next to a piece that mentions at least nine living people. (I'm pretty sure the photo is not of Mises, Hayek, or Keynes.) How in the world are we supposed to know which of them is pictured in the photograph? And if we don't know who the photo is of, what is the point of it? "Ooh, someone probably mentioned in this story looks like this!"

"You see, these nations, these new emerging nations, these new shining cities, we hope they will join us, but they can never replace us. Because their light is but a reflection of our own." -- Senator Marco Rubio

You see, you puny lesser nations, the very best you can hope for is to be a second-rate imitation of the United States.

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.
2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.
3. You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you’re going away for a while, don’t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they’ll still be there when you get back.
4. Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.
5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the sy…

"The underlying issue, which the Supreme Court has now ratified, is Wal-Mart’s authoritarian style, by which executives pressure store-level management to squeeze more and more from millions of clerks, stockers and lower-tier managers."

So, the Supreme Court was asked to approve or disapprove of Wal-Mart's authoritarian style? I had thought, and apparently the justices had thought as well, that the question was one of when a class action suit is appropriate. What fools we were! The case was actually all about style!

Now you can write, "Even Gene Callahan, a critic of libertarianism, acknowledges that Metcalf's article on Nozick is 'crap.'"

UPDATE: From Steve Horwitz: "But one point that hasn't been made enough is the way in which Metcalf and some of his defenders including Jonathan Chait are abusing and misreading the famous Wilt Chamberlain example in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The point of that example was NOT to justify all forms of wealth acquisition and not even voluntary ones as Chait seems to think. It's not an exercise in justification, moral or otherwise. The point was to demonstrate a problem with what Nozick called 'pattern' theories of justice such as that of Rawls."

Part of maintaining an ideological cadre is sheltering it from the destructive criticism to which every ideology is vulnerable. One way to do that is to make anyone leveling such criticism out to be such an idiot that they aren't even worth reading. For instance, Geoffrey Plauche recently posted the following:

"Another irony: someone..."

"Someone"? To Plauche, I am apparently he-who-must-not-be-named: he periodically references something I have just written without naming me or linking to my post.

"enamored of Voegelin recently attempted to use a Hayek quote to argue, in effect, that liberals/libertarians are no different than statists, "

This is a favorite netwit tactic: When someone makes a comparison between A and B, the netwit comes back with: "So, you think A is the same as B!"
Me: Dogs are like porpoises in that they nurse their young.
Netwit: So you think dogs are no different than porpoises?!
Well... NO. That's why I compared t…

I had to blog it twice: The rationalist finds "the intricacy of the world of time and contingency so unmanageable that he is bewitched by the offer of a quick escape into the bogus eternity of an ideology."-- Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics

"It's 6:15 in the morning, and you're getting calls about terrorist threats?" -- Aaron Hochner's wife to Aaron Hochner on Criminal Minds, after he has just received a call about a looming terrorist threat.

OK, let's set aside the issue of whether or not the US government is really dealing with terrorist threats properly. (And, my libertarian friends, I'm totally down with you in believing that our current polices tend to produce, rather than to alleviate, terrorist threats.) But what the hell is this statement supposed to mean? That she thinks, "OK terrorists, well, you're going to kill a few thousand of my fellow citizens... but couldn't you at least schedule their death at a decent hour of the morning?!"

"Economics neither approves nor disapproves of government measures restricting production and output. It merely considers it its duty to clarify the consequences of such measures. The choice of policies to be adopted devolves upon the people. But in choosing they must not disregard the teachings of economics if they want to attain the ends sought. There are certainly cases in which people may consider definite restrictive measures as justified. Regulations concerning fire prevention are restrictive and raise the cost of production. But the curtailment of total output they bring about is the price to be paid for avoidance of greater disaster. The decision about each restrictive measure is to be made on the ground of a meticulous weighing of the costs to be incurred and the prize to be obtained. No reasonable man could possibly question this rule."

He thinks each government intervention should be evaluated for its own particular effects, and no general rule can be …

that the .1% of the population that are anarcho-socialists and the .1% that are anarcho-capitalists like to battle each other over rights to the word "anarchist," when to the other 99.8% of the population it is a synonym for "kook"? Wouldn't both sides be better off getting a wholly new name?

When anarchists want to point to working, stateless social orders, one the frequently point to is the great medieval trade fairs. Well, oops: "It finds that contract enforcement at the fairs did not take the form of private-order or corporative mechanisms, but was provided by public institutions."

"A study of Locke as a thinker would have to explore the vast shadowy field of half thought that sur­rounds the rather small nucleus that in itself is not too clear. His mode of philosophizing was characterized by a good deal of whim.

"Spurts of irritation by contemporary evils would push his thought in a direction he would not have moved, could he have seen the end of the road. And he could follow the road with complacency because the energy of the push gave out long before the end came into view. It is an interesting mental constitution. The men who have the happy gift can indulge in irresponsible boutades of thought, can pro­duce considerable havoc and misery, and can nevertheless sincerely protest that their intentions have been misunderstood when the mischievousness of their indulgence is held up to them.

"Speaking less metaphorically: Locke's spiritual gifts and intellectual abilities were no match for the problems he tried to solve, and his ethos…

So I read that "the purpose of property rights is to permit conflicts over scarce (rivalrous) resources to be avoided." This idea caught my fancy, so I called my friend, Furcifer, over to my house to have a discussion about this, as I knew he, as a libertarian, was well-versed in property rights theory.

Eugenius: Furcifer, let us stroll by the Gowanus Canal while we reason together, as I always like to take the air there at this time of year.

Furcifer: Yes, but shouldn't we first lie upon couches with some beautiful young men for a spell?

Eugenius (sotto voce): Furcifer, this is a family publication! Wait until later!

Furcifer: Right you are. So, we are together today to discuss the notion that private property exists to prevent conflict, an idea I certainly endorse.

Eugenius: The idea sounds nice. I don't like conflict, not one bit! But I note that property rights don't prevent conflict with thieves.

Anytime someone raises a devastating objection to your position, which has never been defeased, call it a "tired old chestnut" and tell the person they should look "in the literature."

This comes up sometimes in a more personal form: Someone will say to me, "Gene, I can't believe your are bringing up that objection. Don't you even remember how you used to answer it?"

Well, yes, I do. And the reason I don't hold that position any longer is that I came to understand that answer -- the same one you are about to give me -- was woefully inadequate to meet the objection, was, in fact, typically a way of dodging it or defining it away rather than meeting it. And I realize what enabled me to blind myself to those answers' inadequacy was my desire to sustain my belief system as it was, since I had become comfortable with it.

So, as I understand them, the libertarian defenders of abortion as a right in this thread basically take the position that the fetus is an unwanted interloper using the body of the woman desiring an abortion for its sustenance, and therefore she is entitled to "evict" it from her body, just as anyone of us would someone who jumped into our car and demanded to live there for nine months and be fed in the meantime.

Now, surely, given this view, we are not allowed to do any worse to the unwanted passenger than is necessary to evict them. So, for instance, if we can simply lift their passive body, which is giving us no resistance, out of the car and place it on the side of the road, we would not be allowed, instead, to take a chain saw to them and chop them to bits inside of our car, right? (Let us posit we have a healthy back, they are a light person, etc.)

Then let us imagine a surely conceivable scenario from the "not-too-distant future." In this future, bioengineer…

Challenging Krugman and DeLong, Mario Rizzo claims he saw the future too. I say all of these guys prognosticate like my mother plays left tackle. You want prognostication? Then check out this post from two years ago!

"[In Gorgias,] Polus will have to restrain the prolixity of his speech (makrologia) in which he indulged earlier, because the interminable suave flow of clichés in his speech makes discussion impossible. The condition of Socrates touches upon a problem, familiar to all of us who have had experience with rightist or leftist intellectuals. Discussion is indeed impossible with a man who is intellectually dishonest, who misuses the rules of the game, who by irrelevant profuseness seeks to avoid being nailed down on a point, and who gains the semblance of victory by exhausting the time that sets an inevitable limit to discussion. The only defense possible against such practices is the refusal to continue the discussion; and this refusal is socially difficult because it seems to violate the rules of comity and the freedom of speech... [But Socrates] reminds [Polus] that his freedom to be prolix would destroy the freedom of the interlocutor, if the latter were not permitted to simply go…

When I posted "Obligation," some libtertarians pretended not to know what I was talking about. (Even though I could have clarified my point better, I think it was obvious enough what I was referring to: Plauche was only interested in trying to make an opponent of his ideology look stupid, and not in discussing what he knew me to be saying. It is also humorous that Plauche decides I am a communitarian: ideologues cannot stand the thought that it is possible that others are not ideologues, and so the urge to slap on a label as fast as possible.)

So let me make this very clear with an example. Let's say you are walking along the road on a cold winter night, on your way to an opera you very much want to see. Halfway there, you hear a cry. You look down, and there is a baby lying there, shivering in the cold. Otherwise, the road is deserted.

The baby needs medical care. The problem is that the hospital is in the opposite direction from the opera house. If you take the baby th…

"I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child—a direct killing of the innocent child—murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?…"By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion."

PSH responds to my recent posts on Lockean property theory here. (By the way, certain people who occasionally comment here might look to PSH as a role model: although often tragically mistaken, PSH is unfailingly polite in error, and is an honest participant in discussion.)

I feel that PSH is missing the point of my posts, which is that no current property has this pristine Lockean past, and, as he points out, instead it is owned by a pragmatic compromise that decides that social order and prosperity should trump redress for far distant crimes. THEREFORE, the libertarian claims of injustice at the slightest encroachment upon property rights is invalid. ALL of our current property rights are social creations, therefore society may adjust them without any necessary injustice. (That is NOT to say that all possible adjustments are just!)

Property rights and governments arose together out of already existing tribal social arrangements, and not out of Lockean homesteading or Hobbesian barga…

What is absolutely remarkable in this argument is that first, libertarians justify unrestricted private property rights by citing Lockean theories of homesteading and voluntary title transfer. But then, when you point out that pretty much no property in existence has such an unsullied past, they respond by essentially saying, "Well, now, that's hardly important, is it?"

I just bought a 4 GB memory stick for $10. Buying it made me think of my first large storage purchase, a 10 MB drive for my Tandy 1000 that cost me $500. If I am calculating correctly, the cost of 1 MB of memory has dropped from $50 to 1/4 cent (and that's in a much more flexible form in the contemporary case). The price has dropped by a factor of 20,000.

Our house in Milford, PA, is in a ravine. So I understand why mobile phone reception is bad. But what I don't get is why it is so fluctuatingly bad. From second to second, without moving at all, I will go from three bars, to zero, back to three. Does anyone understand the physics of cellular reception well enough to explain what might cause this? Silas?

"This day came in his Majestie Charles the 2d to London after a sad, & long Exile, and Calamitous Suffering both of the King and Church: being 17 yeares: This was also his Birthday, and with a Triumph of above 20000 horse and foote, brandishing their swords and shouting with unexpressable joy: The wayes straw'd with flowers, the bells ringing, the streetes hung with Tapissry, fountaines running with wine: The Major, Aldermen, all the Companies in their liver[ie]s, Chaines of Gold, banners; Lords & nobles, Cloth of Silver, gold and vellvet every body clad in, the windos and balconies all set with Ladys, Trumpets, Musick, & [myriads] of people flocking the streetes & was as far as Rochester, so as they were 7 houres in passing the Citty, even from 2 in the afternoone 'til nine at night: I stood in the strand, & beheld it, & blessed God: And all this without one drop of bloud, & by that very army, which rebell'd against him: But …

“For central to Nozick’s account is the thesis that all legitimate entitlements can be traced to legitimate acts of original acquisition. But, if that is so, there are in fact very few, and in some large areas of the world no, legitimate entitlements. The property-owners of the modern world are not the legitimate heirs of Lockean individuals who performed quasi-Lockean… acts of original acquisition; they are the inheritors of those who, for example, stole and used violence to steal the common lands of England from the common people, vast tracts of North America from the American Indian, much of Ireland from this Irisih, and Prussia from the original non-German Prussians. This is the historical reality ideologically concealed behind any Lockean thesis.” -- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue So if libertarians who make the "mingle one's labor with the land" argument take it seriously, what they ought to be doing right now is calling for the most massive property re-distributi…

During the seventeenth century in England, dissenting Protestants (Adamites, Anabaptists, Barrowists, Behmenists, Brownists, Diggers, Enthusiast, Familists, Fifth Monarchists, Grindletonians, Muggletonians, Philadelphians, Puritans, Quakers, Ranters, Sabbatarians, Seekers, and Socinians*) were twice offered toleration, once by Charles II and once by James II, in a package deal that included toleration for Catholics as well. Both times they rejected the offer, preferring to be persecuted themselves than to see Catholicism tolerated.**

* -- Source: Wikipedia.
** -- Note to methodological individualists: by "they rejected the offer," I mean enough of them that the deal collapsed.

Oliver Cromwell, in roughly one year of campaigning in Ireland, succeeded in killing off about 600,000 Irish out of a population of 1.4 million (mostly due to famine resulting from his scorched earth campaign, although he did have the entire population of a couple of towns butchered).

The English, in shame, have never mentioned him again.

Ha! Just kidding! In 1899 they put up a statue honoring him in front of Parliament.

But since then they came to their senses, and now that they are an ally and fellow EU member of Ireland's, they have pulled it down.

The "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 is often viewed as having protected the traditional liberties of Englishmen. The chief two liberties being protected seemed to be those of persecuting Roman Catholics, and persecuting dissenting Protestants.

"It is only possible to understand the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity adequately from a standpoint external to that culture." -- Alasdair MacIntyre, "After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century:

Antiahithopel asked if I could post some of the books I have found to be "most enlightening." OK, I'm going to give this a whirl, although it's a rather off-the-cuff effort, and I'm sure I've missed many items I shouldn't have: